May 24, 2005

In Search of Answers From the Great Brains of Cornell

By PETER EDIDIN

Dr. Barbara L. Finlay of the psychology department at Cornell, with part of the Wilder Brain Collection.

Michael J. Owkoniewski for The New York Times

A cross-section of a cortex is mounted on a slide.

ITHACA, N.Y. - In the basement of Uris Hall, the squat concrete building that houses the psychology department at Cornell University, Prof. Barbara L. Finlay unlocked the door to a room identified by a handwritten card as "The Looney Bin."

"Here they are," Professor Finlay said, turning on the light in the cramped space cluttered with lab equipment. To one side was a small rolling cart carrying eight human brains in glass jars filled with formaldehyde. They looked rubbery, like Halloween gag items. One, the brain of an infamous criminal executed in 1871, was green.

"A nice peppermint color," suggested Dr. Finlay, who has been a professor of cognitive and brain science at Cornell for 30 years.

The brains on the cart are usually displayed in a glass cabinet on the second floor of Uris Hall. They serve no scientific purpose, Professor Finlay said, but they do make a powerful pedagogical point.

"The students who come in here and pass by the display cabinet," she said, "are forced to confront the brain. This is the thing. This is where you happen.

"I want them to confront the question, 'Is there something else or not?' "

Professor Finlay, who researches evolution and brain development, is also curator of the university's Wilder Brain Collection, which consists of about 70 brains, most stored on shelves in an even more cramped closet next door.

Most brains there, including two that belonged to children, are unidentified. They are all that remain of more than 600 brains that Bert Green Wilder assembled in the belief that they would lead to a breakthrough in human understanding.

Wilder was a distinguished anatomist and the creator of the Cornell anatomy department.

And he was certain that the answer to Professor Finlay's question was "not."

To prove it, in 1889 he founded the Cornell Brain Society to collect the brains of "educated and orderly persons," including friends and colleagues. His own unremarkable looking brain floats placidly in a bottle on the cart just inside the door.

Wilder was riding the crest of a neurological wave, said Brian Burrell, a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Massachusetts and the author of "Postcards From the Brain Museum."

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the "golden age" of brain collecting, Mr. Burrell said, a period when collections were started by scientific organizations in Philadelphia, Paris (the nicely named Society for Mutual Autopsy), Tokyo, Moscow and elsewhere.

One force behind the effort was a desire to drive religion from the field of science. Another was a belief, inherited from Franz Joseph Gall, the 18th-century founder of phrenology, that different parts of the brain served different functions.

Even if experts could not tell people apart by their cranial bumps, the theory went, if science closely compared one brain with another it would eventually be clear why one person differed from another, why one was a genius and another a criminal. The brain would reveal the person.

The phrenologists were wrong, of course. Comparing the anatomies of different brains showed nothing, or nothing meaningful. Over time, most of the brain collections were dispersed or disposed of, forgotten and neglected.

A few years after Professor Finlay arrived here, she recalled, she decided to do something about what remained of the Wilder Collection.

"There were all these brains in the sub-subbasement of Stimson Hall, the undergraduate biology building across the street," she said. "It was 1978, and the university was thinking of sending them to the Smithsonian or some other place.

"I said we should keep them. It is in fact one of the first collections to try to physicalize the brain, to map human abilities onto particular structures and locations, even if it wasn't successful."

The Cornell administration said, in effect, fine, but take care of this basement of deteriorating brains. Professor Finlay drafted some students, and they formed a bucket brigade, handing the brains out a basement window and walking about 200 brains across the street to Uris Hall.

"One passer-by looked into the buckets," she remembered, and asked, " 'Are those what they look like?' "

Many of the brains were desiccated or in otherwise poor shape, and more than 100 were disposed of. "Properly," Professor Finlay hastened to add.

Eight identified brains were put on display. The rest went to the closet. But their lives are not dull, Professor Finlay said, adding, "They see a lot of action in the elementary schools around here."

Her curatorial role, meanwhile, quickly settled into naming a graduate student assistant curator and giving him the responsibility of making sure that the jars were topped up with formaldehyde.

This has been going on for so long, she said, that many former assistant curators are now professors elsewhere.

The fledgling science behind the collections is visible in neuroscience today, as it continues to cleaves to some of the same principles and aspirations.

The hot question in neuroscience is consciousness, what it is and how the brain could possibly give rise to it. Scientists today are "groping in the dark" for an answer, much as they did in the 19th century, said Dr. Christof Koch, the author of "The Quest for Consciousness" and a professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology.

"We don't understand how mind emerges out of this vast collection of neurons," Dr. Koch said. "We have no intuition. It's like Aladdin rubbing a lamp, and a genie appears."

Dr. Roger Penrose, a mathematician and the author of "The Emperor's New Mind," agreed that there was a mystery, one that he thinks will require the discovery of new physical laws to unravel.

"The brain collectors back then are a little bit too close to what people are doing nowadays," Dr. Penrose said. "They tried to correlate physical structure with personality. It's a worthwhile thing to do, certainly, and interesting. But just finding what functions different parts of the brain serve won't give us the answer."

Meanwhile, the brains remain on their cart. "The brains help me to place myself in a scientific lineage," said Professor Finlay, who sees in them an early effort to link conceptually the physical brain and the intangibles of personality.

"The progress since then," she said, "has been to place those domains in bigger and better explanatory contexts. Our physical and cognitive descriptions get better and deeper, and that is the tradition, to keep opening the window of explanation wider and wider."